As a setting for a wedding, the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, is hard to beat.
The main hotel is a magisterial white wood-framed lodge that looks like a luxury steamship run aground on a golf green. It’s the kind of resort with long views and endless gray-decked verandas. A servant-powered tricycle mounted with a vintage beer cooler picks its way through the chaise lounges, the better to deliver the guests beverages that are truly ice-cold.
But the star of the show is Mount Washington itself, the highest peak in the Northeast. The mountain rises from the immaculate grounds like the flank of an untamable beast, bristling at its distant peak with antennae from its weather station, which still holds the record for the highest surface wind gust – 231 miles per hour! – ever recorded by a human being.
The wedding we attended there last week was an international affair. Guests on the groom’s side included an uncle and cousins from Germany; the bride, who was born in Taiwan, was surrounded by a nuclear family whose members are typically separated by the Pacific Ocean.
The language barrier was significant, but nearly everyone spoke at least a little English, and many of the foreign guests were fluent. At the reception, the German uncle delivered a toast that transcended classroom English and attained real eloquence.
The groom is a rocket scientist; the bride, a recent PhD in microbiology from Hopkins. The tables at the reception were packed with labmates and Ivy-leaguers, movers and shakers in the worlds of science, finance, and – of course! – literature.
All of that brain power in the shadow of Mount Washington reminded me of another moment in the storied history of Bretton Woods: three weeks in July, 1944, when delegates from the Allied nations gathered to discuss the future of the global economy.
World War II was still raging, but the Allies were already looking ahead to the end of hostilities and the beginning of the astronomically expensive reconstruction that was sure to follow.
An international economic summit in the middle of world war didn’t seem premature to the negotiators who stalked the verandas in the July heat. In fact, the deliberations were as much backwards-looking as they were preparations for an uncertain future. Two world wars had served as bookends to a Great Depression of global dimensions. Trade warfare, hyperinflation, and currency devaluations had contributed mightily to the murderous tensions between nations.
The prevailing idea at the time – and the idea that still shapes the monetary policy of the world’s wealthiest nations – was that lasting peace could only be found through shared prosperity. As Cordell Hull, the United States Secretary of State put it:
Unhampered trade dovetailed with peace; high tariffs, trade barriers, and unfair economic competition, with war…
One of the greatest barriers to international free trade was the fact that each nation regulated its own currency, which could be used as a kind of weapon against its neighbors. The agreement ultimately hammered out at Bretton Woods required each nation to adopt a monetary policy that tied its currency to the U.S. dollar, thus stabilizing world currencies relative to one another.
The Soviet Union participated in the Bretton Woods negotiations, but ultimately declined to join the newly created International Monetary Fund (IMF), which was an unabashed expression of the view that capitalism – even a capitalism somewhat curbed by regulation – was the future of global peace and prosperity.
The other Allies – and by this, I mean only the wealthiest and most powerful nations; the Bretton Woods agreements were for the exclusive benefit of the so-called First World, not the Third World – weren’t unanimous in their support for the IMF and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which was the precursor to what we now call the World Bank.
Despite their objections, they accepted the vast majority of the terms. Devastated by war and beholden to the United States not only for military assistance, but also for post-war reconstruction, even proud nations like France and Great Britain were forced to acknowledge the U.S. as the center of the world economy and agree to policies that would help keep it there.
Nearly seven decades later, in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008, some world leaders have called for a “Bretton Woods II,” a new international monetary system that would reflect a new financial world order.
As the European Economic Community seemingly teeters on the brink of dissolution, and financial turmoil sweeps the globe at the speed of the Internet, the interdependence of the economies of nations has never been clearer.
Let’s hope our leaders remember the sobering truth that drove the discussion at Bretton Woods: where there’s free trade, there’s at least the hope of peace. When each nation acts only in its own selfish interest, war is sure to follow.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 06 October 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
